This Is The Only Beautiful Architecture Left In Crumbling Detroit

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Though Detroit has recently been looking like it was hit by a
convoy of mile-wide firenados, there remain signs of
architectural grandeur illustrating why it was once known as the
Paris of the Midwest.

Perhaps nowhere is this faded beauty more palpable than in the
large-format photography of Philip Jarmain, a Vancouver native
who's spent three years shooting Detroit's sublime edifices,
sometimes just months before they were wiped out by
bulldozers.

Jarmain may be from Canada, but he has century-old family ties to
Detroit and extreme respect for the place.

"At one point this was probably the most important city in the
world in terms of innovation, craftsmanship, and manufacturing,"
he says, adding that one of his childhood heroes was Henry Ford.
"It was just such an incredible city in the early 1900s, and
obviously things went horribly sideways at some
point."Lee
Plaza.Philip
Jarmain

When the 41-year-old advertising photographer started hearing
disturbing rumblings in 2008, he decided to venture south to
document the city's Art Deco and Neo-Classical past before
something horrible happened (well, even more horrible than the
riots and urban
decay). So he hooked up with local historian Sean Doerr
of Buildings of
Detroit fame, and set out to locate what he calls the
"iconic Detroit architectural masterpieces" hidden in a crumbling
labyrinth of 80,000 to 100,000 abandoned buildings.

The search became more urgent when he realized many of his
subjects were being eliminated by demolition crews trying to
reduce the city's expensive-to-maintain footprint (not to mention
what he thinks were bored youngsters setting off fires). "It's
just sad because it is so beautiful, it has some of the best
examples of early 1900s architecture of any city in North
America," he says. "Also, it probably rivals Baghdad in terms of
burnt-out structures."

While many photographers have rushed to stricken Detroit, lured
by the so-called "ruin porn" that attracts sightseers to the
wastelands of Chernobyl,
Jarmain's mission is a bit different. He wants to preserve these
venues with as much accuracy and detail as possible, so that
future generations can look back in wonder about how bright the
city shined. For that reason he lugs around a sophisticated,
Dutch Cambo technical camera and
German-engineered Schneider lenses. "These images are 5 feet by 7
feet," he says. "It's the best camera system out there."

The fruits of his nine trips into Detroit now hang on the walls
of San Francisco's Meridian
Gallery for the show "American Beauty: The Opulent
Pre-Depression Architecture of Detroit." The exhibit focuses on
the more ghostly and rotted-out carcasses in his oeuvre, although
some of what he photographed has since been rehabbed into
functioning spaces. Jarmain points out that several start-up
companies have also invested in Detroit, including the
luxury-watch company Shinola, a designer of an electric
Tesla-like vehicle called the SP01, a nouveau-vintage bicycle
maker, and
others.

"Despite all the hype about the
bankruptcy, for the first time in 50 years Detroit could come
back," he says. "So I'm an optimist."